A big congratulations to the BC Courthouse Library Society for launching a new series of legal research video tutorials, including a new YouTube channel for sharing these gems via the firm Intranet!

This announcement comes in the wake of VALL’s fantastic screencasting workshop put on by the BCCLS’s Alex McNeur & Drew Jackson a few weeks back. I hope a few law firms (especially in BC) will take advantage & re-publish these internally. It doesn’t get much easier than cut-n-paste!

Please drop by & check it out. Sample below:

Congratulations to Drew, Alex and everyone at BCCLS! . . . [more]

June Callwood was a prominent journalist, author and social activist. The 2nd annual June Callwood Lecture in her memory is coming up in Toronto as follows:

Friday, April 25, 2008
7 p.m.
Toronto Reference Library
789 Yonge Street

Justice Denied: the Wrongfully Convicted in Canada
Guest Speaker: James Lockyer,lawyer and social justice advocate

James Lockyer is a founding director of the Association in Defense of the Wrongly Convicted (AIDWYC), a Canada wide organization which advocates for the wrongly convicted. Called “a tireless defender of the underdog,” Lockyer has been involved in exposing many wrongful convictions in Canada, including the

Grumpy folks like me are always complaining about how the kids aren’t learning anything in school these days. That may or may not be true, but it turns out there’s another culprit: Blackberries.

According to a recent study, some psychologists have found that sending text messages results in a temporary decline in IQ of up to 10 points. This is on par with the effects of sleep deprivation, and much worse than using marijuana. The researchers labelled the effect “infomania”.

Symptoms of infomania include lost productivity, an inability to concentrate, and rudeness in the workplace. As far as I . . . [more]

…two days late.

And about a half important thing: the semicolon. It seems that there’s agony in some quarters again about the fate of the least celebrated member of the punctuation family this side of the interrobang. Semicolons (which seems an unfair name because it’s more than just half a colon: there’s a whole virgule in there too!) are either liked (can’t say loved) or hated (can say loathed). I’m solidly on the “like” side, finding them quite useful for joining two related thoughts that are somehow too hefty to be married by a mere comma but not sufficiently . . . [more]

On April 1st, 2008, a couple of significant pieces of legislation came into effect in Nova Scotia, no foolin’. Firstly, Nova Scotia became the first jurisdiction in the country to ban smoking in vehicles when children are present. More specifically, by Chapter 54 of S.N.S. 2007 amending S.N.S. 2002, c.12

1. Section 5 of Chapter 12 of the Acts of 2002, the Smoke-free Places Act, as amended by Chapter 59 of the Acts of 2005, is further amended by adding immediately after subsection (2) the following subsection:
(2A) No person shall smoke in a motor vehicle when any person under

I’d like to thank Dominic Jaar for firing up this new screencast on tracking new decisions on CanLII using RSS. The website Dominic uses is called Feedity. A great tool BTW…

I wrote a post back in 1996 on how to scrape cases using Feedtier, the web-predecessor to Feedity. Same software, same technique. But this time you get a great full size movie on how to do it!

Nice work Dominic! . . . [more]

James Hogarth has provided a summary, “How to buy a standard in 10 days“, of the process by which Microsoft’s Open Office XML was approved as an ISO standard (subject to an appeal, as Groklaw notes.) I wonder how many lawyers were involved. . . . [more]

The case of Q. (P.) c. L. (A.), Quebec Superior Court, concerns a claim by a father for damages against his former wife and the mother of his children, based on the fact that she made unfounded allegations of improper sexual touching of their two young daughters against him. The catchlines in 52 C.C.L.T. (3d), 242, say in part, “… Mother’s vindictive behaviour and untimely fashion in which she launched infernal machine against father constituted civil faults for which she was liable”. I cannot find the phrase which was translated into “infernal ma-chine” in the reasons for judgment, though . . . [more]

Legal blog watch notes the continued use of footnotes in blogs by *some* lawyers.

And guess what? We have the footnote blog plugin enabled here on Slaw! Now, it’s mainly used by the senior members (and by senior, I mean those members way more knowledgeable, experienced, pleasant & nicer looking than myself. [Enough sucking up? – nah, this is Simon & Simon we’re talking about here. They’re nice guys! ] But this could have been footnoted, couldn’t it? oh, but I digress… ).

Ok, Fess up!! Who actually uses that footnote feature! We are in so much trouble… . . . [more]

Back in the 70s, then Professor ((pre Dean and pre President)) Harry Arthurs touted Osgoode Hall as the best law school in the Commonwealth.

I’ve just read an extraordinary newsletter from Oxford which lists such an extraordinary range of academic, comparative and pro-bono activities that I wonder whether any other law school could match it.

Whether this is due to the new (Canadian) Dean of the Faculty Timothy Endicott (whom we have saluted before) or just that for the first time, the whole seems larger than its collegiate parts, but page after page manifests intellectual energy and engagement.

And . . . [more]

One of the joys of having iTunes on a Mac is the ability to share music with others on the same network, at work, say, or in the home. (You can do something similar on both PC and Mac with the help of Simplify Media, which mediates between your iTunes and that of those you invite to share.) And now with a new entry into the shared playlist field, Muxtape, you can upload a dozen MP3 files to make up a playlist available via a browser. Your tunes are generally available, but essentially a listener would have to . . . [more]

Today’s Globe and Mail carried an announcement of the death of Gaylen Duncan, whom many Slaw readers will recall as the dynamic Executive Director of the Canadian Law Information Council.

He was a witty, passionate, charming, brilliant pioneer, schooled by Michael Kirby (still in Halifax then) in the dark arts of making things happen. CLIC brought together lawyers, librarians, publishers and government – Gaylen was skilled in making us all share in his vision of what might be possible in a world where legal practice was empowered by technology and universal access to legal information. . . . [more]